Five years ago, Sylvia Ann Hewlett terrified women with her book Baby Hunger, a warning against leaving motherhood till too late. Now she's back with another shocking message: employers are writing off women once they've had children. And we're all losing out, she tells Emily Wilson.

Seven seasons of the hit TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer were not enough for its legions of devoted fans. The wait for season eight is finally over, writes Emily Wilson - what a shame it's only a comic.

What is it with divorced fathers? It was October 1994. My parents had just separated after 20 years of marriage and, feeling guilty, my dad decided to take all of us - two sons and two daughters, aged between 14 and 21 - to Samos, Greece for a week of 'bonding' and 'quality time' together.

Emily Wilson: There are those who might argue that books such as Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady - a novel in which worldliness, cruelty and black deceit triumph over the hope and light of youth - might not have much in them for the very young. But how wrong they would be!

Emily Wilson: Thomas Hardy wrote: "Casterbridge ... was a place deposited in the block upon a corn-field. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chessboard on a green table-cloth."

Emily Wilson: Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and it shows. Backlash (subtitled The Undeclared War Against American Women) is punchy, well-written, well researched, convincing, thought-provoking and, in parts, very funny. Faludi's detailed and wryly observed interviews with a selection of some leading anti-feminists are a particular treat.

The Vatican has decreed anyone with 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies' need not apply to the priesthood. Those with only a 'transitory problem' are, however, now welcome. Can you can ever be just a little bit gay, wonders Emily Wilson.

Desperate housewives going bonkers in the suburbs, sexist-pig husbands, women sacked for getting pregnant ... tick, tick, tick. The book is a 526-page manifesto for good old-fashioned women's lib. It is also a stonking read, which is why it sold by the cartload.

Walter spells out the battles - the big battles - that still need to be fought; she talks about the fact that when a woman has a child, the truth about "equality" tends to slap her hard in the face. But she is also upbeat, bouncy even, about the state of play.